Me too. I can code and test pretty fast, but because of the policies where I work, it takes a long time to actually ship a change, and often we only catch bugs then. I’m not talking “time to create and deploy a binary to a cloud region through an API” I’m talking “we have to roll the binary out piecemeal at a slow rate, on purpose” over a little under a week.

So basically, a bug can set you back a long time (multiple weeks). And to reduce the risks of bugs we usually need to ship incrementally. And because bugs are such a hassle we have to monitor and test the crap out of everything, which of course we should be doing anyway, but we do it more than we probably would otherwise. But of course bugs do still happen, and even someone else’s might set you back. A flip side to slow releases is releases tend to batch more changes. And of course that makes finding a bug more time consuming.

So a feature that could take me a few hours to write and test at my top performance basically needs to be budgeted at a month of work. Of course, we have other responsibilities like testing, monitoring, analysis, support, design, coordination, helping others. But dragging out completing a project drags all that out too. If I could ship to staging same day and prod 1-2 days later, I wouldn’t need to plan so much or spend so much time going back and forth about design. We could just meet up about the change and do it that week.

And you might think you could simply parallelize/pipeline more tasks, but overdoing that sets you down the path of overextending yourself. If something important goes off track you need to do everything to get it back on track - if you don’t, it’s going to be really late - and overcommitting eliminates the slack that makes it possible.

Truly, this is something I think about all the time and probably the least favorite aspect of my job. Anyway, unless chatgpt can help me write a persuasive argument that convinced my company to completely 180 its engineering policies, it won’t make me much more productive.